angharad_gam

 Life has been pretty quiet lately, divided mostly between work and video games, which is not entirely unusual in summer, when I tend to bunker down against the heat. Now that Autumn is officially here I am going to try and tear myself away from the screen a bit more. The last week or so has not been a good start, delivering in approximate order - three new staff at work, a cold, and a foot injury. I don't know what I have done to  my foot, only that it hurts when I walk on it. There's no causal event I can remember , there's no bruising or other surface sign of a problem, the pain feels different from a soft tissue injury, and it's not located at any obvious joint, and I seem to have exacerbated it doing the grocery shopping yesterday. Maybe this is like the time my knee swelled up for no reason. 

The other news is that I have signed up to run the kitchen at a weekend long rapier event in September. Still very much in the planning stages at the moment.

I swear I had a resolution to post more this year, but there's a reason I tend not to make new year's resolutions...

So what happened?
Well, I may have briefly mentioned I was acting director for a while at the end of last year. I came back from holidays to a bunch of frantic phone calls saying that the guy I was filling in for was still away and could I keep doing it for another 2 weeks. And then after that two weeks, another two weeks...this went on for the next two months, basically. I didn't mind in the sense that I am angling for a position at that level, and every bit of experience helps (also they were paying me more, and not expecting me to do my job too, unlike the last time I did this), but it was a trifle frustrating to mentally tidy up the loose ends and prepare to go back to my job, only to have to change direction again when it turned out that no, the guy was not coming back just yet. Several times.

And then I had to catch up with my job, which hadn't really been filled while I was away. And then somehow it was Easter, and my parents were visiting, and then my phone died and had to be replaced, and then I made the mistake of starting to play Dragon Age: Inquisition. That game sucked me in in a way that not much has for a while, and then, being a Dragon Age game, chewed me up and spat me out. I remember Andy playing the first one when it came out (in about 2009 I think) and hearing him moan about it, and thinking 'this is not for me' even though character and story driven RPGs are totally my thing. But Andy started playing the prologue around the time I was starting to get bored all over again with Skyrim, and I thought 'that looks interesting' and that was the end of my life for the next month.

(For the uninitiated the Dragon Age games are full of ambiguous moral choices where there are often no right answers, well-drawn characters who you fall in love with and then have to make dire decisions for, and very little in the way of happy endings)

Somewhere in the middle of this, the LJ terms of service change came through and I decided I didn't really want to post there anymore, but I dithered (and was kind of busy) about moving over here for a while. I also mostly stopped even looking at LJ so I have gotten a bit out of touch. Anyway, now I have finally made the plunge. I have moved over all my old posts, so I may well get around to deleting my LJ account eventually, but I'll leave it up for now with a redirection notice. I can't say how often I'll post, because I used to mostly post LJ stuff on my phone, and there's no app for this, as far as I can tell. I should try and be a bit disciplined about doing it at the computer when I am working from home (which is a lot at the moment), but see note above about resolutions.

As for things at the moment: we currently have a Malaysian exchange student staying with us, which is a bit of a shock for a house full of introverts, and probably a shock for her too. Thankfully she seems to be more bemused than horrified by the boys antics. The garden is entering its winter phase - some kind of Thing has taken up residence in it - a Thing that comes out at night and digs through the compost and eats seedlings. I have been feeling remarkably well, for no reason I can particularly tell - all my biochemical indicators are as tepid as usual - so I am enjoying it while it lasts. I have not been doing as much crafty stuff as usual lately due to Dragon Age, but I am hoping to pick up a bit more now I have finished the game (although I should note that as I came up to the end I was thinking 'there's no way I could play this through again', and then within one day of finishing the main story I had rolled up a new character and started another play through - but there's less urgency (and angst!) with this one as I know what happens now).

So then, farewell LJ, hello Dreamwidth. 

(I was going to post a pic, but it looks like I can only do that from a URL - might have to tinker a bit...)

I have been predicting for a while now that when the six months o' crazy was up I would fall in a heap, and here I am, heaplike. It's been an eventful few weeks to round out the six months o' crazy.

Firstly, the week before ASC I had a sore breast. I thought this was some kind of hormonal thing, except it was fairly localised and getting worse. Turned out I had mastitis. I didn't know you could get that if you weren't breast feeding, but apparently you can. Although, to be fair, the doctor said it could equally as well have been cellulitis - it was just a matter of which tissue the infection was located in. Either way, I went off to Sydney feeling a bit sorry for myself and loaded up with antibiotics.

The conference venue was an old locomotive workshop, which was kind of neat, except the conference rooms were rather spread out and there were a lot of stairs. Kind of a triumph of trendiness over accessibility. I made the mistake the first day of thinking I would be okay with the stairs and spent the rest of the week hobbling around with a sore ankle, and taking the lift. The ankle is still bothering me. I took it to the doctor last week and he said 'yeah, sorry but there are no shortcuts'. Basically, tendons are poorly vascularised, mine is probably messed up with a lot of scar tissue from previous sprains, and it will be done when it's done. A little work is good for it, but take it easy, so no heels, no stairs and no dancing for a while :-(.

Mum and dad came over to visit last weekend. This was the first time they have actually seen our new house. It was great because we had them, and one of Liam's friends (okay, well technically he is Liam's only proper friend) over for a sleep over, and it was totally okay. In our old house such a situation would have meant people being slung from the ceiling for lack of space. I took a long weekend, and it felt like a very well deserved one, and it was a bit of a drag going back to work (it doesn't help when the kids are on holiday).

I managed two and a sort of one days at work last week (on one of them I forgot my laptop, so I ended up going home and working at home, insofar as that is possible when it is school holidays and the house is full of kids). But for the last few days I have been stuck in bed with an unpleasant laryngitis type lurgy. Last night I basically couldn't talk at all. Which was very frustrating when Andy turned the TV over to Clash of the Titans and I felt the need to rant about Sam Worthington's hair (or lack thereof).

Given all of this, we completely failed to make it to AVCON this weekend, and I'm trying to summon up the energy to go to a feast next weekend (is there much point if I can't dance?).

I didn't realise how long it had been since I posted. To be fair I was in Canberra for nearly a week with bad hotel internet, and then, not long after I got back, we were shaped for a few days. Also I have been spending a lot of time playing ESO lately and that requires me to use Andy's gaming laptop. There's no way this slow old thing could cope with ESO, but I don't want to set up any of my accounts or anything on another computer, so I haven't been checking email much and mostly doing other internet things on my phone. Supposedly we will soon (which probably means in about two years) be getting BYOD capability at work, and then I will get a lovely and exciting new laptop that can do all the things. That is my ultimous dream anyway.

The doing my boss's job and mine at the same time thing seems to being swinging strongly towards mostly doing my boss's job and not doing much of mine. However, I rather badly need to start working on some slides for a talk I am supposed to be giving at a conference in July, so I hope the pendulum will swing back the other way a bit next week. I have managed to wheedle my way out of the travel I was thinking I might have to do the week before the conference, which is helpful, but I think I have actually just postponed it until later in July. August is going to be the month of falling in a heap.

Today we had a rather nice lunch at the Blue Gums Hotel in Fairview Park. Tomorrow is gardening. Tuesday is catching up on all of my Monday meetings as well as my usual Tuesday ones.

The feast went fairly well. It was pretty hectic, partly because I had a collection of fairly inexperienced helpers, and partly because of menu design. Almost everything in the second course was cooked on site, which meant there was a lot of things happening in the kitchen in the lead up to service of that course. I think I will be careful in the future to spread precooked dishes more evenly through the feast. Having said that, the menu was deliberately designed to have small, nibbly things in the first course, which lend themselves more to precooking. Something to contemplate for next time anyway.

The following week it was Erin's birthday. We all went out to see the Lego movie. I think it was the first time we have all been to the movies together. In the past it has either been Andy and I together or either Andy or I with one or more kids. Erin turned thirteen, so we now officially have a teenager in the house - scary!

Andy caught a cold, and then I caught it too, and this laid me out for most of last weekend. I bought a heap of flower seedlings a few weeks ago and between taking the kids to an Easter fair, making pasta, feast and now illness I haven't managed to plant them out yet. The poor things are still stuck in their little seedling tubs. Also the front garden badly needs weeding, but that hasn't happened for the same reasons. Hopefully I'll have some time coming up though. I am taking a week off after Easter.

First I have to earn it though. Tomorrow I am heading off to Perth for work. I have never been to Perth, but I'm not going to see much of it. I get in about 8pm tomorrow and leave again at 5:30pm on Thursday.

Also our old house is now under contract. We managed to get some new pipes just in time to get the carpets steam cleaned before the first people came through. We actually sold it privately, with a little assistance from Andy's dad who is a retired real estate agent. We put it up on Gumtree and seemed to get quite a lot of attention that way. What surprised us was the number of people who rang up and asked to see the house and then turned out to be real estate agents who just wanted to try and persuade us to let them sell it.

The house was actually only on the market for a couple of weeks. We priced it fairly low because there it still needed a certain amount of work, but we will still get enough to pay off all our mortgages and put a fairly comfortable lining in the bottom of our bank account, so we are pretty happy about that. Now we just need House Buying Man's bank to come through.

The pox has descended on our household - the chickenpox that is. Both Erin and Liam have chicken pox. Poor Erin has it quite badly, although she seems to have turned a bit of a corner today. Liam seems to have been building up to it more slowly, and is just starting to get into the full itchiness today.

In addition to this, Ashwyn spent most of Sunday night coughing and then most of Monday throwing up.

I am co-presenting a seminar on Friday, and both of my other co-presenters have been away for much of the last two weeks.

I am exhausted.

...but I am starting another course this week.

It's only four weeks long, with two programming assignments, so I figure it won't be too much of a drag on my time. It's a course on the software/language R, which is becoming big news among statistical software, and although we primarily use SAS at work I have been using R a lot more lately (it is cheap and has a lot of fancy new methods included) and it makes my brain hurt. This is in part because it is an object oriented language, with which I have very little experience, and in part because it is an open source entity, and support/manuals etc leave somewhat to be desired. I am hoping a more systematic approach to learning it will make it all a bit clearer.

It's good timing in some ways because I am taking this coming week off. I have been meaning to take some time off lately, but since I keep getting sick it has never seemed to be a good time. But since my current supervisor usually takes time off in the school holidays I figured he wouldn't complain too much about me doing so. We're actually going to Victor Harbour for a couple of nights, from Monday, and I'm guessing we'll all be offline for that time.

We're also thinking about moving house. Not soon, but soonish. Andy's elderly relatives were very kind to us in their wills, and we are shortly (any time now, it's been more than twelve months, but it's really very close now we keep being told) going to come into rather a lot of money. After briefly considering various wild schemes, we've decided to keep it simple and just buy a new house. This place seemed pretty large when we moved here, from living in townhouses/units, and having only a small Erin and a toddler Liam. Now we are five, and I am only a few years off being the shortest person in the house (the perils of procreating with someone eight inches taller than you) this house is beginning to seem a trifle crowded.

It also seems a good chance to move into a catchment of a slightly nicer public high school than the ones in this area. The trouble is this means moving out of our established suburb into a newer development, where the ratio of house to garden is rather smaller, and when you look out over the landscape you see not trees but roofs. And, of course, giving up this garden with so many mature fruit trees, and ready-made vegetable garden, compost heap, and so on. Which is a shame. But it would certainly be nice to live in a house with a proper linen cupboard. And enough storage space for all the board games, costumes, books, computers and other geekery that is spilling out all over the place here (or mouldering away in the Shed of Mildew). And as several people have pointed out, this house is rather damp and may be contributing to the spells of ill-health we (but mostly me) have had in the last few years.

So we're in a bit of a wierd place at the moment. It's Spring, and planting season, and everytime I plant something I think 'I may not be making use of this'. I'm planting a lot of things in pots at the moment. I look at the cherry tree and see that there are going to be masses of cherries this year (assuming we can keep the bloody parrots off them) and I wonder if we'll still be here to pick them. We might well, of course. Buying and selling a house is not a speedy process by any stretch of the imagination. But it's wierd.

...and how!

Came back from the conference this afternoon and lay on the couch for a moment. When I opened my eyes it was suddenly four hours later. Still I slept badly last night and, of course, hardly at all in the 48hrs preceding so perhaps not entirely surprising. Of course I have now slept right through the dinner hour and can't really bring myself to eat at 10pm in the evening. Strangely I'm not hungry, which I hope is because I had a large lunch and not because I'm going to wake up ravenous at 5am. As opposed to waking up at 5am just because that is when the sun rises here at the moment.

And just now there was a street protest which seemed like a strange time for one (at 10:15pm on a Tues night) given the streets were pretty much empty. Perhaps they just didn't want to go out in the rain. It was raining Queensland style for most of the afternoon. There was another protest on Monday at lunchtime, which seemed like more sensible timing. All something to do with students and the grand prix or something - I haven't been watching the news much.

Anyway I got the two talks I was due to give out of the way today, so hopefully now I can relax and enjoy the rest of the conference. And maybe try to get my sleep/eat cycle in some kind of order.

I got a phone call while I was in Canberra on Monday (at an offsite in a place that was almost cut off from the outside world  - there were all of two or three places where I had mobile phone reception, and internet was $25 a day!). It was the guy from our travel section. Apparently the US consulate didn't think they could process my visa in time (actually the problem was not so much processing time, but postal time to get my passport from Canberra to Sydney and then here to Adelaide). And for some reason they said I don't qualify for the visa waiver program when travelling on an official passport, which makes no sense at all.

So I am heading to Canada on Sat night with with the vague hope of possibly getting a visa while I am in Montreal, except that the travel guy wouldn't book me any flights to the US in case I couldn't go there, and I can't get a visa without a confirmed itinerary. So while I could rock up to the Montreal consulate on Monday morning (when I actually have some free time) and give them a fait accompli, what I'm actually going to have to do is ring them up, find out if getting the thing is feasible, then contact the office (with delay due to time zone differences), get them to send me stuff, and then probably take time out from the conference to apply.

I'm beginning to think one day in Washington (which is what it is going to be if I can wrangle it) is not worth it.

*sigh*

My brain, meanwhile, seems to be on an periodic cycle of excitement, terror and exhaustion.